Plan to smuggle jets into Iran busted

Ben Wolford

For anyone — let alone a middle-aged airplane mechanic from Texas — the plan to smuggle seven jetliners into Iran was audacious and risky.

It also failed.

It involved planes in China, Swiss funds and a blacklisted Iranian airline. Federal prosecutors say Diocenyr Ribamar Barbosa-Santos, 52, of Fort Worth, Texas, tried to broker the $US136.5 million deal out of Florida.

But it failed this month before a single Airbus A300 left the ground.

"It's not every day that someone walks into your office with a charge like this," said William Barner, the lawyer representing Barbosa-Santos, who has been accused of violating federal trade restrictions. If convicted, the penalties include 20 years in prison and a $US1 million fine.

In Iran, the demand for commercial jets is becoming urgent, and the tentacles of a black market for aircraft have seeped into places close to home.

Advertisement

South Florida is a hotbed of illicit transactions of all kinds, investigators said, but lately many have involved the rogue state.

In 2009, an Iranian woman was sentenced in Fort Lauderdale for trying to broker a deal for 3500 pairs of night-vision goggles. Then in 2011, Felipe Echeverry, now a defendant in U.S. District Court, led undercover agents to a Miami warehouse where he was storing 22 F-5 fighter jet engines awaiting export to Iran.

Barner is quick to distinguish between these cases and the charges Barbosa-Santos faces.

You will now receive updates fromBreaking News Alert

Breaking News Alert

"I've seen nothing suggesting that it's anything related to military, nothing related to terrorism," he said.

The US outlawed dealings with Iran in 1995, before recent concerns about the nation's nuclear program. But government officials say sanctions on civilian aircraft buttress the security efforts.

How Barbosa-Santos found his way into the fabric of a major international struggle is unclear. The US Attorney's Office in Miami and agents at Homeland Security Investigations have not revealed the specifics of the case.

The federal complaint says Brazilian-born Barbosa-Santos is now a US citizen. The only crime on his record was disorderly conduct and trespassing in 1997, when he was living in Fort Lauderdale for which he wasn't prosecuted.

In 2001, Barbosa-Santos registered a business called Aerojet Engineering, based a few hundred yards away from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Three years later, he registered Aerobraz Aircraft Marketing Corp. out of the same office. Barbosa-Santos signed paperwork as the president, vice president, treasurer and secretary. His mailing address was listed in suburban Fort Worth.

Meanwhile, in Miami, Barbosa-Santos obtained a mechanic license to work on planes from the Federal Aviation Administration.

At some point between his beginning in the aviation industry and January 2012, Barbosa-Santos apparently started talking to people involved in a network of Chinese government officials and suppliers eager to tap into the Iranian market.

For companies inside Iran, "it's been very difficult for them to engage in a legitimate financial transaction," said Alfred DeAngelus, a senior special agent for Homeland Security Investigations.

Moving seven commercial planes is easier than it may seem. According to federal court filings, Barbosa-Santos was planning to pay a Chinese source $19.5 million apiece for seven planes to then sell to Iran Air.

Getting them into Iran would have involved complicity among high-ranking Chinese officials, said investigators and a veteran aviation consultant.

"The customs services of many nations and the police services of many nations, they're paid so poorly that there's a lot of corruption," DeAngelus said. "It's easy to pay somebody to turn their head."

In February, a federal agent, acting on a tip from a confidential informant, arranged a meeting with Barbosa-Santos in Fort Lauderdale, prosecutors said in a federal complaint. Barbosa-Santos warned the undercover agent that they could both go to jail for the deal, and then added that he hoped to sweeten it with a C-130 cargo plane.

Investigators took Barbosa-Santos into custody on November 2.

As tensions boil between Israel and Iran, the topic of sanctions is largely uncontroversial. In South Florida, home to the second-largest American Jewish population, lawmakers have pushed for crippling restrictions.

The sanctions "are definitely having an impact. There's no question about that," said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University.

But safety anxieties are rising among Iran's flying public. Since 2001, 1017 people have died in Iranian plane crashes, the National Iranian American Council said last year.